Questions regarding port of Sybase to Oracle

Hiya,

Forgive what may seem an ignorant question, but I have no knowledge of what Oracle can offer to port what is a relatively complex system from Sybase. Currently, we're doing an evaluation of the amouont of effort involved in doing a port.

The system makes heavy use of Sybase DB-Library and Open Server applications to interface front ends (such as Unify Vision) to OS level functions (eg: email). The system is essentially a fault collection and distribution system for a SCADA system.

What I would like to know is:

• Is there anything like Sybase Open Server for Oracle? This is a central part of the entire system; if it is absent, we may have to redesign large chunks of the applications.
• I'm assuming there is something similar to DB-Library. Is it simple to move from DB-Library to the Oracle version. We make use of registered procedures, and other advanced parts of DB-Lib.
• In Dejanews, I've read that Oracle can't do full online database dumps, but it can do "tablespace" dumps. As we make once daily DB-Dumps and hourly transaction dumps to keep a remote standy system up to date, would tablespace dumps suffice? What is a tablespace, and how does it relate to the database?
• I'm assuming most of Sybase's Transact-SQL can go over without too many problems. Are there any caveats to watch out for?

Some further information to help understand the concepts (for those that may not have come across Open Server before now). Open Server is essentially a C API that allows you to write your open database server, than can handle very specialist stuff, act as a gateway, and allow you to do all sorts of other advanced things.

We're using at a basic level: as faults come into the system, they populate one table, that logs the change of state of each point. Every time a point comes in, it fires a trigger on the table, that eventually does:

        exec SERVER_NAME...t_COS_ins @mp, @state

Now, the server given by SERVER_NAME is an Open Server application, written purely in C, that contains "registered procedures". A registered procedure looks, at the SQL level, like a normal stored procedure. But it isn't, being coded external of the database, within its own server application. This allows us to pass incoming faults into a C program without the C code having to poll the table for changes. On this table, polling would be ineffecient and slow: we'd want to see the change immediately it comes in. Once the registered procedure has been called, then that passes it to other parts of the system, does various checks to see what the fault actually means, and notifies workstations that the fault has come in (using DB library functions to call registered procedures in a couple of WinNT apps).

I hope the above description makes some sort of sense. The Oracle web page didn't seem to offer any help, and phoning Oracle to get further information hasn't resulted in anything useful.

If anyone could provide any information or pointers, it would be most welcome.

Thanks in advance,

Chris...

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